Author: dbachman

This is the final issue of my tenure as an Opinion Editor, and during such a volatile, strange, scary, and dangerous year, I have never been more aware of or grateful for having been given supervision of this kind of platform. Opinion sections of newspapers are a tricky thing; they so often can draw controversy for the wrong reasons, or be used to cause harm. However, an opinion section can also give rise to a great deal of good. We can speak truth to power, give platforms to vital experiences and narratives, and facilitate interpersonal connections. But this is a space that is difficult to negotiate, something that can so swiftly switch from doing good to inflicting harm.

This year, it has been my privilege to read an incredible array of diverse, well-written, and potent articles, ranging from analyzing women’s representation in film, to understanding the intricacies of campus conservatism, to Milo Yiannopolous’ general, violent boringness, to pugs, to spring, to an innumerable collection of reactions to the 2016 general election. As the section’s only returning editor from the previous semester, it has also been my privilege to work alongside an entirely new staff of incredibly talented, passionate, and intelligent writers as co-editors and assistant editors. As I graduate in a few weeks, I end my tenure proud of what I’ve been able to participate in, and who I’ve been able to do this with.

However, there is work to be done.

I do not wish to repeat too much of what the opinion section articulated in our joint op-ed, “Addressing Our Lack of Diversity.” It spells this out clearly: while there is somewhat more diversity in experience, argument, and identity within the section, we are extremely far away from what the section could and should be. Steps must be taken, and they will be. But in starting an initiative like this, there are many pitfalls that need to be addressed so that they can be avoided.

It is important for an opinion section to avoid being a monolith. We need a variety of opinions and perspectives in order to function as a place where dialogue can occur. But, as true as that may be, it is this ethos that so often leads to the publishing of potentially harmful, poorly formed ideas. Intellectual diversity only works with scrutiny. Everyone involved in the process of diverse journalism needs to hold writing to the highest possible standard. As a section, in order to move forward, we need to ask ourselves the same questions with every article. What is this piece arguing? How is it arguing that? How easily can it be disputed? How easily could it hurt those who are reading it? Could it be better articulated? Does it need to be paired with a counter-piece? Is it controversial because it needs to be or because it wants to be? All writers are subject to these pitfalls, and all writers need to be held to this standard. And ultimately, if, when being held to this standard, something crumbles, it needs to be tabled until it is up to the standard it needs to be. Otherwise, we will inevitably repeat our mistakes, or hire someone like Bret Stephens at the New York Times to craft unfounded, easily disputed, harmful articles.

Many will decry this as an affront to free speech, but this is an irresponsible understanding of the concept. Free speech and free press does not mean that it is our civic duty to publish anything and everything we are given. It is that reasoning that has led us to cause harm on this campus before. Free speech protects you from the persecution of the government, not the scrutiny of your peers. And for this section to function, the opinion section needs to rely on the scrutiny of these peers. If you are planning on submitting to this section, it is important to understand that your words will not go through unfettered. If it is not actively harmful, we will not edit your argument, but we will make sure that it is expressed clearly and responsibly, with clarity of style and substance. I realize that not every piece is something of sober seriousness, but even the sillier material needs to be held to a standard for this section to truly develop into what it can be.

For many of my fellow Argus members, and for myself, this is the first newspaper we have ever been a part of. Writers and editors here are often unpaid, and always students. This level of rigor in the observation and editing of content is difficult. But if we are to talk the talk, we must walk the walk, and make sure this is well-organized, functional and productive space: a space that isn’t derailed by poorly articulated pieces or pieces whose arguments only exist to put down others.

I am proud of this section. It has been a great joy in my life to work here. But, there is so much work left to do for this place to become the most productive and powerful space it could be. And we can only do so with rigor, scrutiny, and the dispelling of the concept that every idea and every article is worth publishing.

CONTENT WARNING: Police Violence; Anti-Black Racism.

On April 29, fifteen-year-old Jordan Edwards was shot and killed in Balch Springs, Texas, after leaving a house party with two of his brothers and two friends because the group had heard gunshots and feared for their lives. Officer Roy Oliver—who has since been fired and charged with murder—claimed he fired upon the car containing Edwards and the three others because the vehicle had been aggressively speeding towards officers, though body cam footage, upon review, clearly showed the car moving in the opposite direction. Allegedly armed with an AR-15 automatic rifle, Oliver fired three rounds, one of which struck Edwards in the back of the head, killing him in front of his friends and brothers.

As with all recent cases of police murdering young Black men, the details here feel both uniquely horrific and infuriatingly routine. They are part of an all-too-familiar tale of state-sponsored killing coupled with denial and minor attempts on behalf of related police departments to assuage communities while obfuscating their guilt. Despite the officer’s dismissal and a statement from the Belch Springs police claiming that the conduct that led to Edwards’ murder is in conflict with the values of the department, it’s naive to imagine that Oliver will be indicted or jailed for the killing. This would require a level of awareness and desire to make serious change that continually elude the institutions of American law enforcement. It would require an acknowledgment that Oliver was not some loose-cannon lone wolf, but an agent of an all-encompassing system of anti-Black racism.

It’s important that those of us not directly affected by this individual tragedy or the pattern into which it fits take the time to reconsider how we approach discussing this murder and trying to prevent others from occurring. Certainly, we must steel and dedicate ourselves to pushing for large-scale cultural and institutional change, whether by donating to the organizations that work to protect communities of color from police violence or by investing time in protests, large and small. However, it’s also necessary for us white Americans to examine the language that we use to speak about Jordan Edwards, police violence, and the responses to it in communities of which we are not a part. While we may find ourselves eager to engage in self-congratulatory denunciations of this specific incident, such murders continue to occur because these denunciations are so often uttered in the short term. They too often give way to self-righteous judgment of those most affected, paired with prescriptions on how those who experience things we cannot possibly imagine should act moving forward and amplified by our inability to center ourselves in this narrative.

The most obvious way to do this is to reject any narrative that tries to excuse Officer Roy Oliver’s behavior or generally romanticizes the police as an institution dedicated to justice that fails only in rare instances or in the case of extraordinary circumstances. This means not talking about how difficult it is to be a police officer or how dangerous or how emotionally trying it may be. This means rejecting the idea that the blame for police murder falls solely on the shoulders of the officer who committed the killing and not on the structure and history of U.S. law enforcement. This means being willing to accept the obvious connections between “isolated” shootings, to address them as part of a history of militant and state-sanctioned racism.

Roy Oliver may have acted of his own volition, but unless this statement is followed with “on behalf of racist institutions that conditioned him to do so,” you are more or less erasing the tragedy of all the shootings that have come before and denying your individual responsibility in preventing others in the future. If the killing of young Black men was simply a defect in Roy Oliver’s character, then our nation wouldn’t be tasked with trying to use the same flimsy excuse to justify the slaughter of Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, and countless others. If Roy Oliver were the exception as opposed to the rule—an aberrant independent actor, as opposed to one more in a long line of police officers and self-appointed law enforcement—then we wouldn’t need to have this conversation multiple times a year.

Another aspect of how allyship must continue to reform is with regard to how white allies frame the response by Black communities, how we talk about Black grief and Black anger. The erasure of the emotional pain felt by African Americans in the wake of these killings is no different from the long-standing idea that somehow Black bodies were biologically capable of enduring more pain than those of their white counterparts, a key component of painting people of color as subhuman. If we refuse to acknowledge the extraordinary pain that these murders cause, then we continue the project of dehumanization that depicts Black Americans as emotionless and dangerous. The flip side of this is how we choose to discuss Black anger, specifically in regards to protest.

In the wake of Mike Brown’s murder by Officer Darren Wilson, the Ferguson protests were framed as violent and unhinged, as if they were more or less temper tantrums by a community that didn’t have the—what? Maturity? Strength?—to calmly handle the reality of routine unjustified violence against them. It’s absurd and grotesque to suggest that there should be some expectation of decorum in the face of ongoing butchery, that after watching loved ones and friends killed and hearing their killers make excuses that are so eagerly lapped up in the white mainstream, rage is an illegitimate emotional response, despite the fact that white Americans are free to express far more anger in the wake of even the slightest perceived indignity. After centuries of violence, and with the seemingly perpetual promise of more from the institutions that coddle anti-Black racists, the suggestion that the victims should be expected to abide by the racist standards of a nation that has regularly denied them any outlet for mourning or justice is an explicit endorsement of a status quo founded on the dehumanization of African Americans.

This ugly suggestion extends to the ridiculous idea that Black Americans should be forced to engage with or make space for the voices that seek to uphold this culture of dehumanization. These killings are traumatic. En masse, that trauma could never be conveyed by someone who has not felt it. Also traumatic, though, is the language that is ultimately used to vindicate the police officers who commit these killings. Compounding that trauma are the excuses institutions make for allowing this language to carve out a space for itself. In these inane debates about free speech on college campuses, one often hears the argument that students who are offended can simply not listen to the speech, which is stupid and perverse. Not listening to the speech isn’t the half of it. It’s perhaps equally dehumanizing and traumatic to force people of color to reckon with the fact that they go to school, live, and work around others who consider this speech legitimate enough for a paycheck and a podium, for an interview slot on “The Daily Show.”

Imagine the fear one might experience knowing that this speech, which is demonstrably linked to the rationales that jeopardize and delegitimize Black lives and Black dignity, is being given the opportunity to infiltrate and infect the space in which you live, the chance to sway others to its cause and help them excuse the violence that they’ll never have to directly experience. Sure, there are examples of bigots being brought around because their ideas received pushback in a public forum, but these are few and far between. (They also predominantly occur when the bigot had not been exposed to any competing ideologies at all—such as with Megan Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church—which is itself a rarity.) Most often, these people simply wave off any criticism, certain as they are of their own superiority. Is that slim chance worth the trauma people of color have to experience? Is it worth forcing someone to fear for their life or their emotional dignity? No. It’s not.

America could have saved Jordan Edwards. It could have saved Michael Brown, and Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile. It could have saved Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and Walter Scott. It could have saved them long before they were even born. Each time we don’t try, blood is shed, lives are lost, communities and families are splintered. Each time we don’t try, it is an unimaginable failure. It’s impossible and unconscionable to simply perform tangential mourning and say we’ll do better next time. Next time expired long, long ago.

Rest in power, Jordan.

With the permission of Jordan’s parents Odell and Charmaine Edwards, Mercedes Jackson, a family friend, has set up a memorial fund in Jordan’s name.

At Women’s Marches around the world last January, it seemed like everyone was trying to make the best dystopian-themed joke before the world collapsed. Social media was flooded with protest signs displaying myriad pop cultural references: “Voldemort has taken over the Ministry,” “Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation/information,” “Make Margaret Atwood fiction again.”

Seeing mainstream feminism fight fascism with pithy one-liners, as though comparing Trump to an evil wizard will stop him from banning Muslims, can at times be cringe worthy. But as the Women’s March slogans showed, drawing comparisons between this new administration and prophesizing fiction can at once be a comfort and a brutal reminder that none of these current struggles are particularly new.

So when Hulu’s 10-part adaptation of Atwood’s 1985 novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” premiered last Wednesday, multiple TV critics took space in their reviews to remind everyone that, actually, those seemingly topical plot points weren’t a product of 2017.

“You might guess that the producers had added certain on-the-nose details…[such as] refugees fleeing from Canada; Gilead’s leaders leveraging fear of Islamic terrorists; feminist street protests before the regime’s crackdown,” wrote The New York Times’ James Poniewozik. “That’s all in the novel.”

Certainly, Atwood’s authoritarian state of Gilead is a very extreme version of our own political climate, but seeing it from the eyes of our protagonist, Offred (Elisabeth Moss), makes it no less terrifying. Offred is a handmaid, one of the few remaining fertile women, who are assigned by this new regime to be little more than “wombs with legs.” Along with the upper-class Wives and the working-class servants, known as Marthas, handmaids are subjugated into traditional gender roles in order for Gilead’s patriarchal, fundamentalist-Christian Big Brother to have absolute control of their bodies.

In this world, handmaids like Offred spend most of their days sitting in tiny bedrooms within huge mansions belonging to the high-ranking male Commanders they’re assigned to. (Offred isn’t her real name, but rather a designation of her belonging to Commander Fred Waterford, played by Joseph Fiennes.) Sometimes Offred takes walks through town, the former Cambridge, Mass., always accompanied by another handmaid, Ofglen (Alexis Bledel), so they may act as each other’s spies if one of them steps out of line. On “ceremony” days, once a month, Offred copulates with the Commander while lying in the lap of his Wife (Yvonne Strahovski) so as to completely erase the handmaid’s personhood and reduce her to a potential baby vessel.

She’s not allowed to read—not books, not letters, not even packaging labels in the commissary where she sometimes runs errands to keep busy. The windowpanes in her room are shatterproof. There’s no chandelier to hang a rope from.

Within the first three episodes, which were all released on Hulu at once, we get this exposition through a remarkable balance of showing and telling. Showrunner Bruce Miller takes Offred’s matter-of-fact, persistent, first-person narrative from the novel and turns it into a biting inner monologue.

“A priest, a doctor, a gay man,” she muses, walking past three hanged men on display at the city wall. “I think I heard that joke once. This wasn’t the punchline.”

We also get flashbacks into Offred’s life before the regime, as she and her best friend Moira (Samira Wiley) can only watch as the government slowly and gradually strips them of their agency. When Offred is locked out of her bank account, her money is automatically transferred into her husband Luke’s (O.T. Fagbenle) savings. But Moira, who has a female partner, is left broke. Even then, we see Moira struggling to convince Luke that this won’t just blow over, that progress is regressing and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. Forget the eerie, timely similarities; this is just a great set up for a horror story.

The first three episodes of the show are directed by Reed Morano, currently the youngest member and one of only 14 women in the American Society of Cinematographers. Best known for her cinematography in films such as “Frozen River” and the “Sandcastles” sequence of Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade,” Morano paints a startling contrast between the well-lit, pristine interiors of the Gilead mansions and the terrible oppression going on inside them. In an essay for BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Petersen analyzes Morano’s filmmaking techniques as an illustration of the “female glance,” in opposition to the domineering “male gaze” theory of film identified by feminists in the 1970s.

“Unlike the steady, obsessive gaze, the glance is sprawling, nimble: not easily distracted so much as constantly vigilant,” she writes.

For “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Petersen points to the show’s costume design for the handmaids—red, billowing dresses and oversized bonnets that act as blinders—as demonstrative of that glance. There are plenty of close-ups of Offred’s face that give the impression that we, too, are inside that bonnet, only able to see what is directly in front of us and unable to make eye contact with anyone. We’re unable to and not allowed to.

This is what the show does so well: depicting subjugated women while allowing them to tell their own stories. Even still, it’s remarkable that so few people involved in the creation of “The Handmaid’s Tale” want to use the word “feminist” to describe it. At a recent post-screening panel, the cast and crew staunchly avoided the term, instead repeatedly calling it “humanist.” Even Atwood herself has avoided calling it a feminist story, although she specifically cites her own issues with second-wave feminism as the cause of this.

All of this puts “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the weird position as being a timely—and timeless—narrative that wants nothing more than to just be fiction. To be clear, the religious authoritarianism of Gilead bares little resemblance to the non-spiritual populism of Trump. But there’s no denying that fascism, fanaticism, and the control over women’s bodies have typically gone hand-in-hand, whether it be 1692, 1985, or 2017. To deny “The Handmaid’s Tale”’s depiction of that relationship wouldn’t just be denying its relationship to contemporary politics; it’d be erasing its roots in a long, bloodied history.

Dominic Toretto defies logic. Not just in the obvious way, doing things with cars that one should not, and literally cannot, do. But as an entity, as a being, Vin Diesel’s character defies all logic. He’s a thief and a criminal who goes on stealth missions with shadow agencies, and yet he looks like a giant, a pale meat-locker type, unmissable in a crowd. He’s a poet and a sage, but his voice is quiet, labored, and hushed. He lives by his own code, but that code is absolutely absurd. He says the word “family” far too many times to be a credible human.

And yet, I love Toretto. I love every silly, elaborate appearance that he has ever had on screen. I love his whisper shouts and his pouty, dramatic over-the-shoulder looks. I love the way that the things he says, which every character in his universe takes as gospel, make literally no sense. “In a street fight, eventually the street always wins,” he says to a cowering Jason Statham in the seventh “Fast and Furious” film.

I’m sorry, what?

In the newest film of the franchise, “The Fate of the Furious,” Toretto spends a lot of time alone, glaring menacingly out of car windows. He is separated from the family of drivers and criminals he has built his life with. And as a performance, this is Vin Diesel’s finest hour as Toretto.

“Fate,” with Toretto enjoying life in Havana, Cuba with his wife Leti (Michelle Rodriguez). In an opening scene, a normal morning in the Furious land of gratuitous car shots and human posteriors gives way to the film’s first street race, along the strip known as “Cuban Mile.” In order to save his cousin’s car, Toretto races Havanna’s fastest driver in a sequence that, of course, involves criminal sabotage, driving in reverse, and explosions. The other driver, who tried to kill Toretto less than five minutes earlier, gives him the keys to his sweet-ass ride, saying, “You’ve won the car, and my respect.” Toretto looks back in stoic silence, smiles, and pushes the keys back. “Keep the car,” he growls, “your respect is good enough for me.” It’s both sweet and baffling that he is so quick to forgive the person extorting his family and attempting to kill him, but Toretto is the god of this world of fast cars going fast, and he is a benevolent one.

Of course, Toretto’s paradise has to be shattered, and it is the second he sees about the evilest thing in this world: white dreadlocks. Charlize Theron’s Cypher, a criminal both of the cyber and fashion variety, waltzes into this movie with a plane and a black phone full of blackmail. On Toretto’s next mission for his buddy, Luke Hobbs (the always incredible Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who says both ‘Tay Tay” and “I will beat your ass like a Cherokee drum” in the same movie) along with his driving family (Leti, Tyrese Gibson’s fast-talking comic relief staple Roman, Ludacris’s Tej, and the new addition of Nathalie Emmanuel’s Ramsay), steals a WMD, and leaves them all in his destructive wake. It would be sad, but there’s a giant wrecking ball involved too, smashing everything except for his franchise’s essential silliness.

The film, at this point, diverges into two sections: Toretto’s attempt to escape the blackmail that Theron holds over his head, and Hobbes and co. searching for him under the smarmy supervision of Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), a character introduced in the last film who’s wonderful to see again because, well, it’s Kurt Russell. What is Mr. Nobody’s most important move? Bringing back Deckard Shaw (Statham), the last film’s antagonist. Statham, who was fun if underwritten in the last movie, has a blast this time around, mostly because he appears to be playing the exact same character he did in Melissa McCarthy’s “Spy.”

Many have been underwhelmed by this film. I don’t wish to speak for them, or shame them, but why? Is it dumb? Absolutely. Is it similar to the last few movies, which were gigantic, colorful, testosterone-fueled fever dreams of fast cars and muscly men? Absolutely. Do most of the characters blur into the background? Yes, unfortunately. Is it a little disappointing that Theron, who starred in what might be the best car movie ever made, doesn’t drive in this? For sure, but she’s going for something else here. (This somehow works though, especially in the scene where she’s behind bulletproof glass that, despite everything, I found myself genuinely afraid of.) Is it kind of weird that everyone accepts Deckard as a part of the team after he casually murdered one of their best friends in the last film? For sure. But the thing is, it’s still great. Really great. I-saw-it-in-theaters-twice great.

I mean, how can you hate a movie that takes a fear of self-driving cars to its unnatural extreme? How can you hate a movie that introduces a character named Little Nobody (Scott Eastwood), makes him the world’s worst, blandest buzzkill, and has him get choked out by The Rock within mere minutes of his first appearance? How can you hate a movie with a submarine this big? How can you hate a movie in which Vin Diesel unironically calls himself a tiger? You can’t, that’s how.

The Fast and Furious series has gone on for eight adventures, and yet the formula doesn’t feel stale. Whether it’s because of how outsized and ridiculous everyone is, or the fact that they keep one-upping each other with set pieces (though the parachuting cars in the last film are tough to forget), or because every second of posing, sloganeering, muscle flexing, stuff exploding, and pulp poetry is done with absolute unblinking sincerity, at the end of the day, this franchise is the world’s best dumb idea. We should bow to Diesel and everyone involved for stretching and stretching it without it fading or falling apart. And we should bow to Dominic Toretto, the Fast One, the Furious One, God of the new world, and being of unwavering faith, for always keeping us in the driver’s seat.

Mouth Trilogy Cross Talk

Dan Bachman ’17:  Today we’re going to talk about a trilogy of mash-up albums by internet-genius Neil Cicierega. How would you describe Neil Cicierega?

Will McGhee ’17: I would describe him as fundamental to millennial internet culture.

D: Absolutely.

W: This is the guy who did “Potter Puppet Pals,” this is the guy who did “Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.”

D: This is the guy who did “Animutations,” which could be argued to be the first internet memes.

W: And “Brodyquest.” He’s also known for his original music from his project “Lemon Demon.” But I think his biggest contribution in recent years, starting in 2014 was the first of a trilogy of albums (we did not know it was a trilogy at the time) called Mouth Sounds, which, if you’re not aware, probably started the trend of everyone mashing up “All Star” by Smash Mouth with everything else. The “Smash Ups,” if you will.

D: I definitely think that the starting period of that trend is Mouth Sounds, so called because around seven of its seventeen tracks (which doesn’t sound like a lot, but is) sample heavily from Smash Mouth’s “All Star.”

W: The best description I’ve ever heard, and I think it was The AV Club who said this, is “Punishing 90s Nostalgia.”

D: Yes. And it starts out just about as punishing as it can possibly get. It takes every melody and countermelody in from Modest Mussgorsky’s “Promenade: Pictures at an Exhibition, and recreates it using clipped samples of Steve from Smash Mouth saying “Some” and saying “Hey Now” and nothing else, oh except for the whistle.

W: The iconic “All Star” whistle comes in many times, and will come in many times in future albums. I guess the best way to break down how the trilogy works is that there’s four types of mash-ups that Neil does. There’s the sheer audacity of bringing in songs like “All Star” or “One Week” (by The Barenaked Ladies) for the umpteenth time with something else, there’s another type that runs on the sheer audacity of putting together two songs that are very different pieces together like the track “Imma Let It Be.”

D: If you can’t tell from the name, “Imma Let It Be” is a mash up of The Beatles’ “Let It Be” and The Black Eyed Peas’ “Imma Be.” It does not work.

W: The third type is taking a song or multiple songs, and just utterly destroying them. He does that with Oasis’ “Wonderwall” multiple times.

D: The first of that kind, however, is on Mouth Sounds, and it’s called “No Credit Card.” I think it’s brilliant. He takes the one piece of culture that people remember, for example the line, “don’t need no credit card to ride this train” is the line people would know from (Huey Lewis and the News’s song) “The Power of Love.”

W: And so he only does that line.

D: Yeah, it’s just that line. For five minutes. And it’s actually a great remix.

W: It’s a great song! It just drives you mad. And type number four doesn’t happen until the next two albums, but it’s taking a weird piece of 90s culture and setting it to music, I’m thinking of “500MB” on the third album, which is this voice presenting the new trend of a 500 Megabyte hard drive set to The Proclaimers’ “500 Miles,” and it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard.

D: It’s hilarious. I’d argue there’s also a fifth category, a thematic cut up. And the first example of this is the third track on Mouth Sounds, the album we’re starting with, which is simply titled “D’oh!” It features samples of Austin Powers saying “Yeah baby!,” Homer Simpson’s “D’oh!” to the tune of the violin line in Dave Mathews Band’s “Ants Marching,” The “Doug” theme song, “Baby Got Back” is in there, and it ends with the famous existential monologue from The Talking Head’s “Once in a Lifetime.” And weirdly, it all gels. There’s something about it that feels thematically connected. I think it’s just Neil bridging together a collage of over exposed, and maybe over-celebrated 90s cultural touchstones, and putting them in the exact context that makes them hilarious and horrifying. It’s deconstructing that specific brand of 90s nostalgia.

W: This is the album that flows the best.

D: In my opinion, Mouth Sounds is the best complete album, but it is also Neil when he was the least skilled at doing this.

W: Yes, absolutely, but I still think the best sequence in this “trilogy” is going from “Full Mouth,” which is a mashup of “All Star” and the “Full House” theme into the song “Alanis” which is “You Oughtta Know,” first just Alanis Morissette’s isolated vocals, and then going back to the “Full House” theme, and it’s just brilliant.

D: “You Oughtta Know” was famously written about her ugly breakup with “Full House” star David Coulier. Her singing those lyrics over the theme to that show, that is ironic, which adds another layer to the joke because Alanis’ “Ironic” is arguably one of her most famous songs, and this is a situation more ironic than anything mentioned in it. It’s a ridiculous tapestry made from two simple samples. That’s the brilliance here, there aren’t a lot of samples used, but they’re all used to maximum effect.

W: I love the idea in this one that the further you get into the album the more punishing it is. For me, the low point is the track “The Sharpest Tool,” which is just “All Star” taken so far into oblivion that it’s screaming at you. Then the final tracks mellow into this reprieve built off of Santana’s “Smooth” and an Enya sample. The go together very well!

D: Of course, the album ends the only way it can, with the whistle from “All Star.”

Will’s Favorite Track: “Smooth Flow”

Will’s Least Favorite Track: “Like Tears in the Chocolate Rain”

Dan’s Favorite Track: “D’oh!”

Dan’s Least Favorite Track: “Mullet With Butterfly Wings”

Mouth Silence:

D: Mouth Silence almost like a B-side collection, but somehow it still is pretty cohesive, and virtuosic.

W: It’s called “Silence” because none of the tracks feature Smash Mouth, except if you speed up the album dramatically, and then a low, windy sound over some of the tracks becomes “All Star.”

D: On the last track, “Piss,” there’s a synthesizer line that turns out to spell out “somebody once told me” in Morse Code.

W: The mash ups get…bolder here.

D: Bolder, and more interesting.

W: I think my favorite in terms of “how did he come up with that?” is “Love Psych.” Which is “Love Shack” set to this instrumental, that I first didn’t recognize, and then realized is the score from “Psycho.” The music from the famous shower stabbing scene happens just as “Love Shack” comes to the line “bang bang bang on the door baby.”

D: It’s pants shittingly terrifying, and I think it might be the best track on any of these three albums. He also doubles down on a lot of what he did in the last album. Like “Orgonon Gurlz,” which, I believe it was you who told me that this is a mash up of Neil’s favorite song…

W: And his least favorite song.

D: Yeah, so it’s Kate Bush’s “Cloudbursting” and Katy Perry’s “California Girls” and it’s genuinely really great!

W: It’s certainly something. And there’s another song that introduces the trend of setting 90s nostalgia to music, in this case news clips of people talking about “Pokemon,” some people just describing it and others warning about how dangerous it is.

D: There’s also “Space Monkey Mafia” where he takes the isolated vocals of “It’s the End of the World As We Know it (And I Feel Fine)” and “We Didn’t Start the Fire” are played over, effectively, a polka.

W: This is where the thematic songs really come into their own, like “Numbers” which just mashes up a lot of songs about phone numbers, from “Call Me Maybe.” The “Ghostbusters” theme is here too.

D: That comes back later.

W: There’s also “Best” which is just a song that puts together every song about being the best. “You’re the Best Around,” “Best Song Ever,” and the Folgers jingle, “Best of You.”

D: Some of the songs that I’m reading here in that track I don’t recognize. Gonna have to find them later.

W: Yeah, you’re never going to catch everything on this album. It’s the gift that keeps on (brutally) giving. The only other highlight I’d have to say is “Wndrwll.” It breaks the Oasis song down. It starts with phrases from the song over and over again. There’s also a reprise of the Full House theme, which works here like “Smooth” did as a respite out of all of this bleakness.

Will’s Favorite: “Sexual Lion King” for a particular moment, halfway into the song, where you hear Scar whisper ‘long live the king’ and I die every time.

Will’s Least Favorite: “Orgonon Gurlz”

Dan’s Favorite: “Wndrwll” (With a special commendation for “Love Psych”)

Dan’s Least Favorite: “Close to the Sun”

Mouth Moods

D: So we had these albums within a span of two months, and then nothing, nothing for years.

W: He would upload a few things to his youtube channel, but nothing album-length.

D: But then…

W: On January 24, literally out of nowhere, tweeted ‘is everyone awake’ and then shared the link to Mouth Moods.

D: I think Mouth Moods is by far the most impressive of the three. It has the most sounds and the highest highs, but it’s also his least cohesive. The transitions from insane song to insane song are not as good. But it’s almost irrelevant.

D: The first song “The Starting Line” had me doubled over. The title is both a reference to the Cake song “Going the Distance” and the fact that this entire song is made of opening lines from other songs. There are sixteen opening lines to sixteen songs.

W: Many of these songs are callbacks to past albums like “All Star” and “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” but many are new, and it’s just this massive wall of nostalgic pop. And still, you can actually enjoy this one without feeling pain. It’s funny without putting you off.

D: But what does put you off is the third track, which I lost my mind listening to the first time, it’s called “AC/VC.” It begins with the familiar piano riff of Vanessa Carlton’s “1000 Miles,” and then suddenly, you hear Brian Johnson’s beagle yawp from AC/DC’s “Back in Black” and it does not work, and it is so funny.

W: He brings The Beatles back in this one with “Dear Dinosaur,” which is “Walk the Dinosaur” and “Dear Prudence” with an introduction sample from the film “Super Mario Bros,” because of course.

D: What makes this work is that all of these are connections that no one else would ever think to do.

W: I think the best example of that is “T.I.M.E.” which is “Time,” the closing track to Inception and the isolated vocals from “Y.M.C.A” and it sounds like a funeral dirge. And it ends with the whistle from “All Star!”

D: Of course. After I’m surprisingly moved by the banal lyrics of “Y.M.C.A.” he has to come in with that whistle. So that’s the perfect execution of Neil’s quest to take two wildly different things and make something amazing out of them.

W: And he perfects breaking down songs too. Twice, actually, there’s another version of “Wonderwall” here called “Wallspin” which is the song set to the melody of “Right Round,” and that one is really fun, but you also have “Bustin’.”

D: Yeah, which takes Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters” theme and makes it…sort of about semen.

W: And it ends with a quick Gorrilaz shout out, too.

D: The music video, which he made when he first released this song two years ago, it needs to be seen. It’s amazing. And there’s also the perfect version of the thematic mashup with “Annoyed Grunt,” which takes its name from all the weird vocal sounds and interjections, and lyric-less melodies that make up the song, most specifically Tim Allen’s grunts in the show “Home Improvement,” but there’s Homer Simpson in there, there’s the famous screaming from “Down With the Sickness.”

W:  Yeah, he brings that one out multiple times; here he mashes it with Anne Lennox’s “No More I Love Yous,” which works very well.

D: Also a sample platter, the final track, “Shit.”

W: Which is a response to the final track of Mouth Silence, “Piss,” of course. It starts with “Kiss From A Rose,” which never referenced again for the rest of the song.

D: Later it takes the lyrics of Limp Bizkit’s “My Way” and twists them to be about pooping. “Wannabe,” “Hollaback Girl,” there’s just so much going on here. That being said, I don’t know if this album is as well sequenced or cohesive as what came before.

W: It isn’t, but I will say that the last third of this album just keeps getting better and better, it’s great track before a better track, before a better, track, all culminating with “Shit.” I’d like to give special attention to the song “Wow Wow,” which is a remix to Will Smith’s “Men in Black” theme. It starts with All Star and then it goes quickly into Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker,” mixed in with Will Smith’s “Wild Wild West,” and it’s legitimately enjoyable. It’s one of the least painful tracks on the album.

Will’s Favorite: “300 MB.”

Will’s Least Favorite: “Stand By Meme.”

Dan’s Favorite: “The Starting Line.”

Dan’s Least Favorite: “The End.”

Conclusion

D: I am a different person because these albums are in my life, and I am grateful for that. They’ve helped change and define my sense of humor, particularly musically, and I’m glad we have content creators like Neil Cicierega in the world.

W: I won’t say I’m fundamentally changed, but I will say he’s tapped into a style of joke telling and humor that I’ve never seen anywhere else and he’s perfected his own brand of it. I also think his ability to do divine sacrilege and elevate these otherwise cast aside songs from another era in a new way is very interesting to look out, and I’m curious to see if he continues this.

D: I hope he does.

W: I’m always terrified of where it will go next.

 

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CW: sexual violence

This past Thursday was Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. He is turning 274. He was our third president, and our first Secretary of State.

He was also a slaveowner and a rapist.

Thomas Jefferson is often held up as one of the primary forces in the development of American statecraft. He is considered one of the nation’s foremost early intellectuals, a polymath whose academic and political achievements stand as some of the highest in American history.

He was also a slaveowner who repeatedly sexually assaulted Sally Hemings, a multiracial woman, whom he owned. Starting when she was 17, he forced her to father six children.

The narrative of Jefferson and Hemings, and its normalization throughout history, is an insidious example—perhaps one of the most pronounced—of the sexual violence inherent in slavery and the way that that violence has further normalized the sexual abuse of women of color throughout history. In the American narrative, women of color have repeatedly been painted as objects of little value other than sexual, forbidden from owning and exercising sexual autonomy, lest they be demonized. As historians repeatedly categorized Jefferson’s repeated rapes of Hemings as a “relationship” or “affair,” they erased and flattened the exploitation and subjugation inherent to slavery and the white supremacist heart of the sexual treatment of women of color since this nation’s founding.

This is not a question of semantics. It is a question of how language is used to craft reality and morality, to take the hideousness of sexual violence and to attempt to equate it with non-abusive sexual relationships. It’s a question of how rape culture is perpetuated, of how perpetrators of rape work to minimize the circumstances in which the term has power, to diminish a survivor’s capacity to claim their pain, describe their abuse, name their attacker. It’s about how systems of racist violence are neutered, reshaped to seem like products of their time, marred only by customs modern observers might not comprehend. It is about how the horrors women of color suffer at the hands of white supremacy are so often wiped from the record, deemed lesser narratives deserving of lesser consideration. It’s a question of empowering the white men in their historical mission of laying claim to Black bodies, administering legislative, emotional, and sexual ownership, and rewriting that ownership in innocuous and rosy terms that continue the denial of humanity that the initial violence began.

For years, historians refused to acknowledge Hemings’ assaults at Jefferson’s hands, denying not only that the third president’s actions constituted assault, but that they happened at all. History sought to abuse Sally Hemings. It sought to excuse Sally Hemings’ abuse. Then it sought to erase Sally Hemings from her own narrative, in the quest to preserve Jefferson’s image. Historians in the 19th century, author Annette Gordon-Reed determined in her book “Jefferson and Hemings: An American Controversy” were happy to subscribe to the narrative put forth by Jefferson’s family: that Jefferson was not the father of Hemings’ six children. Although DNA evidence has proved this claim all but false, the existence of the controversy demonstrates the willingness of history to excise the crucial truths of violence against women of color in service of the project of elevating an honorable picture of whiteness. For many historians, keeping Jefferson’s name from being tarnished was a more necessary goal than allowing closure and truth for the family of the girl he abused. Her suffering was less important than his reputation.

Look to current stories of sexual assault, to the treatment of victims. The parallel is clear.

Lionizing Jefferson is only continuing this erasure, eliminating Sally Hemings from her own story by eliminating the facts of her abuse, by painting them in some grotesque romantic light. Lionizing Jefferson is excusing the multitude of atrocities for which he was responsible, against Black Americans and Native Americans alike. Lionizing Jefferson is continuing to casually enshrine racism and white supremacist violence unquestioningly in American history, acting as though the supposed political genius of the American state is reason enough to forget the blood that was spilled along the way to historical “greatness.” Lionizing Jefferson is continuing to treat the plight of women of color as secondary to the real ugly truth of this nation’s history, despite their toil throughout history to bring the character of America closer to what it claimed to be. It is ignoring the burdens and abuse foisted upon women of color, and the nonexistent comfort and recompense offered in their wake.

Thomas Jefferson may be a prominent statesman and historical figure, but he was also an agent of anti-Black sexual violence and a perpetuator of the labels and language that are used to oppress women of color and deny them their autonomy to this day. Thomas Jefferson may have been a polymath, but he was also a sexual predator who willingly and gleefully benefited from systems of white supremacist abuse while claiming to be an agent of Democracy and Justice.

Fuck Thomas Jefferson. I hope someone shits in his cake.

For Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, remember Sally Hemings.